Water transportation

Deep-sea shipping is priced on global freight indices and flagged offshore; nobody enters it from a Canadian start. What is reachable is domestic: cabotage law reserves Canadian coastal and Great Lakes trades for Canadian-flagged vessels unless none is available, so the competition is a short list, and cargoes — grain, ore, salt, aggregates, fuel — move under multi-year contracts. British Columbia (64) and Newfoundland (24) hold a large share of the 192 establishments [A], which is the tug-and-barge and coastal-ferry end. The cut is the hull. Algoma Central, the listed Great Lakes operator, earned C$761M of revenue and C$231M of EBITDA in 2025 [A] — a good business — and to keep it took delivery of five newbuilds in the year with twelve more under construction [A]. That is the steady state: a fleet is always being replaced, each unit is a purpose-built ship ordered years ahead, and the protected trade that makes the revenue dependable also means a vessel built for it has no second market if the contract is lost. Contracts are awarded to the carrier that already has the tonnage; an entrant must commit to the ship to bid for the cargo. Ferries in this code are mostly Crown or provincially contracted routes and are a buyer rather than a market. A small coastal tug, water-taxi or landing-craft service is genuinely startable, but that is a boat-and-skipper livelihood and was not sized here. Maritime software is screened separately.

Inland water transport is a real industry where there is a river system to carry it. Kirby, the largest US inland tank-barge operator, ran 1,105 barges in 2025 and earned $374.5M of operating income on $1,935M of marine revenue, a 19.3% margin [A] — four-fifths of it on the Mississippi and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a year-round network with petrochemical plants on its banks. Canada has no such network. The St. Lawrence–Great Lakes system is classified with coastal shipping, not here. What remains is 103 establishments, 55 of them in British Columbia and 65 with fewer than ten employees [A]: Fraser River towing and log work, harbour ferries and water taxis, lake and river tour boats, seasonal northern resupply. The one inland freight system of any length, the Mackenzie, makes the point. Its long-time commercial operator, Northern Transportation Company, failed, and in December 2016 the Government of the Northwest Territories bought the assets for C$7.5M [A] explicitly to keep fuel moving to communities with no other option. A lifeline route that the private market could not sustain and the state now runs is not an opening. The harbour and river niches are startable with one vessel and a Transport Canada certificate, and some are decent livelihoods — but each is a single waterway with a short season and a fixed number of customers, and none was found that scales past its own shoreline. Maritime software is screened separately.